Deeplinks

Not even a week after AT&T announced plans to adopt undefined technical measures to stop "piracy," NBC Universal has asked [PDF] the FCC to declare that "broadband service providers have an obligation to use readily available means" (emphasis added) to stop copyright infringement. On the unintentionally funny-and-scary scale of one to ten, this is easily an 11.

The comments were submitted as part of the FCC's Notice of Inquiry about broadband policy. Most of the debate in this inquiry has focused around imposing "network neutrality" rules and limiting ISPs' ability to break the Internet as an open platform for innovation by discriminating against particular content and application providers.

Forcing all state DMVs to issue new standardized drivers' licenses under REAL ID seems bound for catastrophe, and the federal government's recent passport delay debacle provides more reason to expect the worst.

According to the AP, "The State Department has been flooded with passport applications since new rules requiring passports for air travelers went into effect in January. The resulting backlog has caused delays of up to three months for passports and ruined or delayed the travel plans of thousands of Americans." The House of Representatives recently voted to delay the rules for 17 months.

With Senators once again attempting to push through immigration reform, check out Jim Harper's excellent article about how the proposal's employment verification section implicates your privacy. Along with expanding the scope of REAL ID before it's even implemented and effectively forcing all Americans to present this standardized national ID in order to get a job, Title III of the immigration bill would establish an "electronic employment verification system" (EEVS) that relies on an extensive government database filled with personal information.

A judge ordered [PDF] the FBI today to finally release agency records about its abuse of National Security Letters (NSLs) to collect Americans' personal information. The ruling came just a day after the EFF urged [PDF] the judge to immediately respond in its lawsuit over agency delays.

EFF sued the FBI in April for failing to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about the misuse of NSLs as revealed in a Justice Department report. As we noted yesterday, more evidence of abuse was uncovered by the Washington Post, and EFF urged the judge Thursday to force the FBI to stop stalling the release of its records on the deeply flawed program.

No, this time we're not talking about spying on telephone and Internet communications on the government's behalf. AT&T is now kowtowing to the entertainment industry and jointly developing undisclosed technical measures in yet another desperate attempt to stop "piracy."

On its face, this may seem reasonable, but problems arise once you start to ask hard questions about exactly what AT&T's up to.

According to the Washington Post, "An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism."

That report [PDF] painted a horror story, including massive abuses of so-called National Security Letters (NSLs). Before PATRIOT, the FBI could only use NSLs to obtain the records of suspected terrorists or spies. But under PATRIOT the FBI can use them to get private records about anybody without any court approval, as long as it believes the information could be relevant to an authorized terrorism or espionage investigation.

Discussions on streamlining ? or what some delegates are describing as ?downsizing? ? the set of 71 proposals into a shorter ?actionable? list are proceeding fairly expeditiously. The Chair, the Ambassador of Barbados, Trevor Clarke, is running this week?s meeting in much the same way he ran the last PCDA meeting in February. The 71 proposals are listed in Annex B to a report prepared by the Chair of the 2006 WIPO General Assembly, (the Manalo report) (see here and here), and are grouped into 6 clusters. Prior to this week?s meeting, the Chair assigned each Regional Group of countries the task of synthesizing a particular cluster of proposals.